Getting a Vista PC but wanting XP - opinions?

Nowadays, it's hard to come by a pre-built PC with windows XP already installed on it.

Some of the reasons why i'd prefer XP is that i've heard Vista takes up more valuable processing resources and also some older games which i still play regularly such as Battlefield 2 and BF2142 have some problems when running on Vista. i haven't fully researched what these problems are yet.


My question is, is it worth getting XP for the extra few frames per sec when you have a Vista PC for gaming? what's the cheapest legal way of getting windows XP? would you dual boot or do a fresh installation?

are OEM Windows XP supposed to be sold to regular consumers like me or is it only supposed to be allowed for system builders?


btw, i have used vista and think it's ok to use, but again, is being able to get the extra few frames per sec on XP worth it?

if teh pc your getting has vista installed then stick with that because it will be genuine (we hope) and you will have DX10 thats of course if you have a dx10 card?

i have vista x64 bit and sometimes vista plays up that much that i just feel like giving up on it and going back to Xp but for me i dont want to loose DX10.

if your only going to be playing older dx9 games then you could go with xp if you wanted.
http://www.ebuyer.com/product/114048

as for the pirated xp question....dont go there mate realy,its against the forum rules to discuss it and its realy just not worth it because whoever make those disks could have put anything on them like keyloggers,virus etc.

so is it perfectly fine to get an OEM version of XP?

of course it is,all the OEM means is its just the cd in a sleeve and not all the fancy xp boxing and manuals which nobody needs.

thats why its alot cheaper.

what games do you intend to play with the pc? whast the pc specs?

i read on wikipedia that OEM versions of XP are not supposed to be sold to end-users, which i assume means regular consumers such as me. but i suppose there's so many OEM XP's available on the internet that it should be fine.

Punkster said:

i read on wikipedia that OEM versions of XP are not supposed to be sold to end-users, which i assume means regular consumers such as me. but i suppose there's so many OEM XP's available on the internet that it should be fine.

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Be warned, some newer dells and my dell laptop in particular. Do not work well with XP. I had to download custom drivers because dell wouldn't support XP for my laptop. This may not be an issue for you, however you may want to be aware that taking a new system built for vista may give you a hard time with drivers.

i have actually dualbooted XP/vista on my laptop which originally had Vista only on it.

I found that it was a bother to do and i only did it to test out whether XP would run a lot more smoothly on it or not and found out that XP does work faster, but there are some things which don't work in XP.

e.g. when i put my laptop in sleep or hibernate and wake it up on XP, the fan for the CPU stops and i can only run the laptop until the CPU overheats and the laptop automatically switches off.


installing XP onto my laptop took me several hours to figure out how to get it working properly and install the drivers to get the laptop working properly.

in the end, with the laptop, i've found that i preferred vista.


however, is XP still worth getting for a medium range gaming PC which has something similar to an 8800GT in it? will the performance gain be justify getting XP?

Punkster said:

however, is XP still worth getting for a medium range gaming PC which has something similar to an 8800GT in it? will the performance gain be justify getting XP?

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depends again what games you want to play,if you want to play future games then go with Vista because of DX10.

the way i see it,no point in having a DX10 card if your not going to use it to its full potential.

The complaints about Vista are uncalled for for the most part. I think XP will stop being supported soon so another reason not to avoid Vista. Plus alot of the fancy resource hogging stuff in Vista can be disabled.

yeah, i've come to the personal conclusion that if i ever finally get a new prebuilt gaming PC with Vista on it, i'd just stick with Vista and not bother with XP.


i've found that in a lot of framerate tests, vista SP1 gets about the same as XP SP3 in general.


any further opinions are still welcome.